Vibes of a Soon to be Commonplace Nature
by SilverCaladan
Summary: Whoever spread the rumor that magic was an orderly, clinical discipline is probably living out their last years looking for the corner of a circular room. PRMF.


**A/N**: So Udonna totally just made this entire fic canon. Oh Udonna, if this is to be your one and only use this entire season, at least it was a good one. Also, snarky omniscient narrator warnings, and said narrator has a rather intimidating and quirky vocabularly.

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**Stage One: Denial Comes Not in Spades, but Floods**

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"_My Lord, the village thanks you for your services defeating the giant bunny of doom." The elf bowed low before a shiny figure, soft on the details, which was standing regally. _

"_It was nothing, Elder. I defeated worse creatures in the war between Fuzzy and Soft. Although something about the doom-bunny puzzles me…" The shiny figure, becoming more detailed as he spoke, was covered in plate armor._

"_I will help anyway I can, My Lord." The elf peered in interest into the knight's small bag._

_The knight unfolded a long sword from the bag. The faint beeping noise audible in the background became much louder. "I do not know why that creature's treasure beeps."_

_BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP._

"_Perhaps it is trying to send you a message, Sire."_

_BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP…._

Suddenly, Chip Thorne was no longer a knight errant. The world jumped, nauseatingly, from soft edges and pleasure into harsh, sweat-soaked pajamas, complaining ribs, and loud alarms. The reason he couldn't breathe wasn't because of the stifling heat of the armor, but a combination of the cotton sheets in his mouth and the cracked ribs his newfound powers had spent all night not-healing.

Chip wasn't the champion of an entire village—oh wait… yes he was. But that was still a relatively new concept to the sleep-addled Chip, who could grok only two things through the haze: he was awake, and the world was not pleasant.

Admittedly, these two concepts, particularly the latter, often escaped Chip's mental grasp during normal operating hours. This morning, however, he had a grasp on a particularly nasty vendetta with alarm clocks that ruined dreams. Alarm clocks, after all, were the bane of mankind. They were the manacles of drudgery, the enablers of sameness, the—dammit, they made thinking hard.

Flinging his arm out wildly, Chip blindly knocked over fast food trash and treasured trinket alike, mumbling dazedly into his pillow all the while. "Shut up, you stupid cheap Wal-Mart imitation…"

Yes, Chip Thorne—and wasn't that a name for which late night brooding sessions were designed—was pursuing that feisty bundle of wires and plastic stamped a clock without opening his eyes. After all, to open one's eyes was to admit defeat to the superior battle strategy of morning. It is unfortunate that this is true, for if the erstwhile paladin were to momentarily pledge a cease-fire with the rising sun, he'd observe quite an unusual sight.

"… why the hell did I buy that stupid shitty thing again…"

Chip's hand passed aimlessly over a pile of receipts, though Lord only knew what they were doing on his bedside table. Finding them too crinkly to be the rough artificial timekeeper, he kept searching. These nebulous yellow sparks leapt from his fingertips, tracing haphazard burn patterns across the crumpled paper. The whole mess was rather inverted from the first snowflakes of winter: brown specks upon a sea of white, not that stubborn Chip noticed.

The leftover change he'd yet to gather for snack machine binges was next in line for groping, his fingers skating familiarly over the cool metal. Of course, as every elementary student knows, metal is a very good conductor of electricity. Therefore, the tenuous sparks transferred from Chip's skin to the coins ran scot-free over the shiny pile, unbeknownst to the muttering source.

"… ugh fuck, where _are_ you, crappy hell-spawn of time…"

Despite Chip's newness to the wizarding hero reality, and consequent bodily discomfort, something about magic just seemed _right_, as if he were finally free to acknowledge a part of himself that was buried under years of fanatic anti-mysticism. In a way, that was exactly what had happened to Chip. It was like discovering a new personality quirk, or an innate talent.

Talents, of course, always feel utterly natural to the user, but look impossible to the viewer. Chip, as the source and user of the sparks, felt nothing amiss. It was just his hand, feeling its blind way along his bedside table in its daily search for the source of irritation.

Unfortunately for him, talents alter in implementation according to mental state. An angry artist will paint things very different from those he would in his normally peaceful state, just as an angry professional boxer is a knocked out professional boxer.

Chip Thorne's current mental state: borderline ticked off.

"AHA!"

Raising his hand in the air a good foot above the now found instrument of wakefulness, Chip prepared to smack the snooze button for sluggish teenagers everywhere.

A somewhat muffled POMF of electrical overload was his only answer, aside from the obvious cessation of beeping. Chip, of course, recognized the sound, as any proper urban and suburban kid would. It's the sound power lines make when something shorts, and it's the same sound the computer makes when it catches fire. It's also the sound that firecrackers make when exploding under water, not that obedient Chip would have any experience with that, nope.

So the sound wasn't the problem, really. What boggled Chip's lethargic brainwaves and tricked him into opening his eyes and jerking as if a novice puppeteer held his strings was not the sound, oh no. It was the incomprehensibility of the sound in context of the setting! Chip was only turning off his alarm; there was no logical reason for the shorting out of his clock.

At least, that was what experience had taught Chip Thorne in his odd years of living. Alas, experience had yet to take into account supernatural activities.

"What… the fuck."

The cheap plastic fizzled pitifully, smoke curling into the air, and pitted with small melted spots. The snooze button was as unrecognizable as London during the Blitz. And through this destruction, merry little fireflies played over Chip's hand, chasing each other in lightning games of tag. Surreal.

Now let it not be said that the orange-haired defender was slow on the uptake, for he figured out quite quickly several important items:

A) Yesterday existed. Oh boy, did it exist; the cracked ribs wouldn't stop screaming long enough for him to even think otherwise. Not to mention the cell phone that he could feel digging into his thigh, stupid bugger.

B) His magic was lightning. Chip remembered quite vividly the static burst that had come from his arms, electrocuting the monsters and sending them twitching away from him. It had crackled through the air, and left that taste of ozone that heralded bad storms.

C) Clocks were electrical. Chip knew this, because he had had a fierce fight with the stupid outlet strip about the new clock. The stupid thing had not had enough holes for the cord, and he had been forced to improvise, absolutely against better judgment. Chip had a nice scar to show for that adventure.

D) His clock was toast. No, it was worse than toast, because Chip could at least have tried to salvage burnt toast by buttery intervention. But his clock was beyond even the restorative powers butter hid.

Conclusion? A leads to B, and B plus C equals D. Therefore, B was the cause of D!

"Jesus fucking Christ on a pogo-stick. That did not just happen."

Ah yes, Chip Thorne's freshmen debate teacher would have been quite pleased with his orderly and progressive flow of logic, even if she would have given him a detention for unnecessary language. Good ole Miss Applebee.

"Yeah, I'm just seeing things. That's it."

Sizzle, sizzle, insisted the ruin of an inside sundial.

Regrettably for Chip's dismissal, his magic wasn't a gift that could be turned on and off, discarded or renewed, at will.

The yellow magic had been acknowledged once, and it wasn't going to go hide in a dark closet again for all the shrinks in the world.

Chip Thorne, adventurer extraordinaire, was **_stuck_**.

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End file.
